Saturday, January 01, 2011

Oh hai, 2011.

I spent my New Year's Eve with some beer, my DH, and about 3 hours of Tosh.O. and I came up with a New Year's resolution. See, I love the internet. Anything I can think of, I can look it up and find out everything I need to know. I am consciously going to devote a good portion of 2011 to just looking up stuff. I've done good so far: "slow loris, Willie the raccoon, what animals are legal as pets in California", and now I can also add "Matt Groening's music taste".

If humanity could only send a handful of representatives to meet with aliens, I hope Matt Groening (or M.G.'s head) makes the list. Father of Life in Hell, The Simpsons, and Futurama, MG's music taste has often been called "eclectic" and for good reason. His range is obscene but more importantly, it's good. He's so good that people ask him to curate music festivals. I didn't know that was possible. You curate art shows, but I didn't know you could do that for music...and that people would go... I first realized MG's music in 2002 while watching an episode of Futurama. It was a regular episode- funny & smart but there was one difference. It played a song during a scene montage...I was blown away. Here on tv was a song I'd never heard of before, and it was possibly, one of the best songs I had heard in a long, long time. I spent a long time searching the web trying to find who sang the song (pre-Shazam, people). I think it was over a year later that I discovered who it was. I'm not kidding. My searching skills are much better now. Anyhoot, turned out it was Pizzicato Five, singing Baby Love Child.

While Pizzicato hasn't done much for me personally besides this song, the Japanese duo has had a significant impact on the music scene, especially for Shibuya-kei.And while I have yet to fully appreciate MG's favorite band of all time, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, I can recognize the uniqueness and instantly realize that what I really need to do is to go outside, drink a beer, and maybe shoot something...could be a bb gun but more likely pool.

Sadly the good Captain did not make it to the new year himself, passing away just last month.